Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education and data journalism

Open Data (or Not) About Designated Public Place Orders on the Isle of Wight

A couple of notices taken out in this week’s Isle of Wight County Press by the Isle of Wight Council raise notice that a couple more areas are to become “designated public spaces”, which means that the police and other recognised officers are allowed to confiscate alcohol (no drinking on the beach…).

Despite my best efforts, I failed to find a listing on the Isle of Wight Council website detailing all designated public spaces on the island, or showing maps of their extent. [UPDATE, April 2015: there is a page here – Designated Public Place Orders (DPPOs) that links to notices for each DPPO that contains a PDF map showing the land covered by each order.]

As with other council orders that have a geographical component, I am ever hopeful that appropriate maps will be made available, in the case of designated public places as a shapefile, not least because I generally have no idea what boundaries the notices refer to when they just describe road names and other geographical features (“along the beach to the point in line with the junction of Whitecross Lane and Whitecross Farm Lane”, for example…). The notice does say “as shown on the map to be attached to the Order”, but I can’t readily find the order on the council website to see whether the map has yet been attached (maybe it’s buried in papers relating to licensing committee meetings?) I did manage to find a map (search: designated public place lake/) but only because I read URLs…

Re: finding maps relating to DPPOs, I’ve had this problem before. The same criticisms still apply – the Home OFfice don’t appear to maintain a single register of DPPOs in force, despite the original guidance note saying they would, although they will release the data at a crude level in response to an FOI request. Again, I wonder about setting up an FOI repeater to schedule monthly submissions of the same request to handle this sort of query to the Home Office.

Drawing on the fan in/fan out notion, a Home Office aggregation of the data represents a large fan-in of data from separate councils, and seems to be the easiest place to get hold of such data. However, it would help if they also requested and made available information about the geographical extent of each order as a shapefile.

Here’s the map, though I’m not clear whether I’m breaching copyright in displaying it without permission:

(As well as posting notices in the IWCP, why doesn’t the council have a /notices area of the website to which it could post its statutory announcements in addition to any other media channels it uses that would act as a convenient, authoritative and archival repository of such notices? [NB quite a few councils do have an area for public notices on their website. For example, do a web search for intitle:"public notices" site:gov.uk] In addition, an area of the site detailing orders in place and in force on the Island so we could keep up with how freedoms are being restricted at any time by the council.)

In passing, whilst trying to find details about DPPOs on the island, I came across a copy of the consultation around the DPPOs on the Gurnard Parish Council website:

The Isle of Wight County Council has received a request from the Hampshire Constabulary to consider the imposition of Designated Public Place Orders (DPPOs) in …”

Hmm… so does the Hampshire Constabulary website list the extent of DPPOs in the region it covers? (I note on WhatDoTheKnow several people have FOId information about DPPOs from police forces.)